The collection
Set of circular nesting baskets of transparent blue glass in different sizes and proportions.
2002

Baskets, Akasma

Designed by
Satyendra Pakhalé (born 1967)
Material
Glass
Produced by
RSVP–Curvet, Ambienti, Italy
Dimensions
15 x 53 x 50cm

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, 2011.170.1–3

Pakhale wrote in the product literature that the name Akasma “means as if something happened suddenly . . . the objects look as if they were just born with ease and almost by chance.”

The manufacturing process, however, was not so easy: the glass had to be cut to the correct size and shape, heated and bent into its three-dimensional form, and finally glued together. He transforms the handmade objects and ancient forms he saw in his native India into contemporary designs through modern industrial manufacturing processes, in this case produced by a firm specializing in automobile glass. He merges craft traditions with modern industry, which through much of the last century had been separate ways of thinking.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, photo: Denis Farley.